Deer harvest way down in Maine

[pastorfarley]

In today's paper there was an article about the reduced deer harvest in Maine. Some check stations and one meat cutter were interviewed and overall a 50% reduction in harvest was common.

The root cause seems to be a hard winter kill last year. This resulted in a drastic reduction in antlerless permits and in the majority of the state even bowhunters are buck only. The objective was to reduce harvest by 4,000 animals, but if the 50% reduction is accurate it would reduce harvest by about 14,000 animals.

The blog on the paper's web site was interesting. At least two posters thought that increasing doe harvest would help maintain the breeding population

[BT]

Doe harvests help?....harde har har
I might agree if the case were numbers being reduced due to over population and/or disease
Maine is tough!

[pastorfarley]

Right after I posted I was walking to the post office and I saw two bucks hanging from a tree near my house. They were fairly large and one had 6 good points I could see from the street, probably 8 with the brow tines, the other was probably a 6 pointer.

The paper did mention some places had seen larger deer this year. Maybe the larger bodied deer survived last year's winter better. Either way much of Maine is actually marginal habitat for deer.

[aloft52]

Moo Hampshire is slow this year as well. I think they are right about the winter culling of last year. Not as much sign around, and more larger deer. Survival of the fittest. The HUGE mast crop of nuts and pine cones isn't helping sightings either. With all this food laying around if we have an open winter here in New England this year it should result in another bumper crop of deer for next fall. Along the seacoast which didn't get as bad a snow fall things seem a little better.
Aloft52
www.aloft52.wordpress.com

[stilllearning]

I have not heard the offical results yet but I think New Brunswick (Maines Canadian Neighbor) was way down as well.

[oldfarmsblueman]

I have checked with the two check stations in my
area and they are seeing a lot less deer in North
Eastern Ct.